HR vs HR: A blog by Dr Diana Damian Martin
Freelance Futures Partner, Migrants in Culture Researcher and Artist Dr Diana Damian Martin explores some of the conditions, assumptions and perspectives at play that led to her co-programming the debate in Freelance Future’s panel Human Rights vs Human Resources.
In 2019, Migrants in Culture conducted a survey on the impact of the Hostile Environment on the cultural sector; that year marked a decade of the Hostile Environment policy, alongside significant legislative changes, with the Nationality and Borders Bill and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. The Hostile Environment, and the legislative changes that followed, are a manifestation of a xeno-racist system designed to be hostile, as well as the legacies and continuation of empire, colonisation and extractive capitalism.
We use migrancy to refer to people with lived experiences of migration, or who are being profiled as migrants because of the colour of their skin, their accent or other characteristics, regardless of legal status, and acknowledge the different oppressions and privileges that can be hidden by this term, the false morality of good/bad immigrants, and the racialisation and othering of Black citizens and citizens of colour.
From our research, and the many experiences of migrants, refugees, those with undocumented or precarious legal statuses, and people of colour most impacted by the policies at play, it is clear the cultural sector often reproduces hostile environments.
Culture is also often deployed as part of nation-building projects, and we have seen an increasingly present culture of xeno-nationalism impacting us all, and a still contentious and tentative engagement with colonial legacies across many aspects of culture and its infrastructure.
We know from our own research that since the implementation of the Hostile Environment policy in 2012, migrants and citizens of colour are experiencing increased discrimination, hardship and access to the cultural sector – over 60% of respondents mentioned this in our survey.
We also know that knowledge is scarce- nearly 2/3rds of respondents in leadership positions in our research had never heard about the Hostile Environment or had little to no knowledge of its impact, and just over half lacked resources or knowledge to support migrant staff. 79% of our migrant respondents did not feel supported in their work place.We also know that migrancy is not a protected characteristic, and that the Equality Act is a resource to look at regarding work discrimination.
In thinking about organizational activism and Human Resources, we can reimagine different cultures built on solidarity, not charity.
We are experiencing the impact of significant changes in the immigration system that include unaffordable status fees, insecurity, single-employer ties through visas, pressures to assimilate and adapt, data harvesting, and we risk reproducing colonial cultures of meritocracy and exceptionalism by promoting and supporting ‘talent’ visas.
We want to see cultures of support that acknowledge the specific challenges of migrant culture workers with really diverse legal statuses and challenges and hiring and commissioning practices that account for the fact that asylum seekers, refugees, traveller communities and undocumented people need representation and legal protection.
We need migrant and lived experience leadership, and valuing migrant workers without tokenism, appropriation or instrumentalisation.
More rigorous understanding of the difference between compliance and collaboration with border forces as well as divestment from companies linked to border security or deportation are necessary. We need codes of conduct and accountability structures that protect migrant culture workers and an awareness of changing cultures of migration beyond generational divides.
We need recruitment processes that safeguard those with precarious legal statuses, and to forge anti-colonial, anti-racist and anti-xenophobic working cultures.
What might our cultural ecologies look like when we organise around migrant leadership, and recognise that migrant justice is inseparable from racial, class, disability and queer justice?
What might healing and reparative practices over hostile environments look like? How might we move away from a host/visitor model, towards building collective safety and agency?
How might we decolonise administration, hiring and administrative practices to make space for abundance not scarcity?
What radical changes beyond the reformist model might we make to acknowledge and support, rather than manage difference?
Dr Diana Damian Martin is a researcher and educator organising with Migrants in Culture. If you want to find out more about how to oppose the Hostile Environment, join Migrants in Culture as part of the Solidarity Knows No Borders week of action 13-19 June.